


Let the Wookie Win

by Demmora



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: chewie is the mom friend and you can pry that headcanon from my cold dead hands, don't mind me just gently angsting over what the canon could have been, meandering thoughts, old eyes in new faces, secondary meta fic in the end notes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-21
Updated: 2018-03-21
Packaged: 2019-04-05 11:55:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14043744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Demmora/pseuds/Demmora
Summary: It’s not that Finn isn’t comfortable on the Falcon, merely that he’s aware of the history that resides within, from the ceiling to the floor and all the miswired circuity in between. This is a ship to whom the people aboard belong.The weight of it is almost as tangible as the shift in g-force when Rey kicks the sublight engines up as far as they’ll go for fun, throwing everything off kilter and upside down without warning. He feels like a sore thumb amidst the chaos, spends his time striving in vain to make sense of the patch job repairs that have been performed over the years, concluding several times over that they shouldn’t be able to get off the ground let alone make five consecutive jumps in rapid succession without pause. Yet here they are, hurtling through space in a bucket of bolts held together seemingly by spit and hope. It defies all order.And that, he reminds himself, staring at the gently sparking wires in the wall as he holds the extinguisher at the ready, is what he wants. He wants this, aching heart and soul. He just doesn’t know how to settle. How to belong.





	Let the Wookie Win

It’s not that Finn isn’t _comfortable_ on the Falcon, merely that he’s aware of the history that resides within, from the ceiling to the floor and all the miswired circuity in between. This is a ship to whom the people aboard _belong_.

The weight of it is almost as tangible as the shift in g-force when Rey kicks the sublight engines up as far as they’ll go for fun, throwing everything off kilter and upside down without warning. He feels like a sore thumb amidst the chaos, spends his time striving in vain to make sense of the patch job repairs that have been performed over the years, concluding several times over that they shouldn’t be able to get off the ground let alone make five consecutive jumps in rapid succession without pause. Yet here they are, hurtling through space in a bucket of bolts held together seemingly by spit and hope. It defies all order.

And that, he reminds himself, staring at the gently sparking wires in the wall as he holds the extinguisher at the ready, is what he wants. He _wants_ this, aching heart and soul. He just doesn’t know how to settle. How to belong.

Rey had adapted almost seamlessly into her new life.  She’d slid into the pilot seat as if the old bird had just been waiting for her. She fits in this space, or perhaps it had molded to fit her. He’s not sure. But either way the sound of her laughter bouncing off the walls from the cockpit—likely at something Poe said—sounds like it was always meant to be here. (The few times General Organa flies with them, and he sees the gentle sad smile on her face, he thinks she feels the same.)

Poe, who prefers his X-wing to all other things, also fits right in to this tight cramped space as if he has always been here. Lounging in a wide, easy slouch that Finn’s programming still can’t allow for, not even after months—hell almost a _year_ —of being free of reconditioning. Poe teases him about it, though not unkindly. A nudge here, an easy, wide smile there that makes Finn’s gut swoop pleasantly, like the lurch before a jump to lightspeed. He’d nearly climbed out of his own damn skin when the pilot had put both hands on his shoulders and _squeezed,_ digging this thumbs into Finn’s shoulder blades while urging him to _relax, buddy, we’re clear out of the system by now._

Rose had rescued him from up and dying right there and then by drawing Dameron over to look at whatever she’d been fiddling with on the console, but it had been a near thing. Especially with General Organa gently chuckling into a chipped mug of caf across the table for him, shaking her head with a gentle kind of contented sadness. A moment of brightness flickering over her weary, drawn face.

He never feels more out of place than when she’s aboard. She moves so softly, like someone moving through another world, and never stays onboard for long. Finn doesn’t need the Force to feel the yawning ache rolling out of her. It’s all there in the the sardonic twist of her smile. For all this ship was once her home, she never stays longer than it takes to get her from one flagship to another as quietly and quickly as possible. Like a ghost.

He takes some solace in knowing Rose feels somewhat the same, sitting close beside him whenever the General is onboard, talking in whispers. But even Rose has a history with Poe that makes her belong with them, long before Finn ever did, and he feels it keenly even though he knows he shouldn’t.

He also shouldn’t be messing with this control panel, but it’s five hours to their next drop point and he’ll be damned if he gets any sleep with Poe snoring in the next berth over like a vibrosaw. The pilot might be many things, handsome, capable and offensively charming, but a light sleeper was not one of them.

He doesn’t have Rey’s inherent skill with machines, not by a longshot, but he knows enough to get by. Or at least he thought he had. The Falcon forces him to improvise in interesting ways, which he secretly suspects was the Organa-Skywalker-Solo method of survival for decades. You couldn’t fall behind if you were kept dancing on your toes, and the Falcon hummed determinedly along to its own offbeat tune. It was an education, if nothing else.

For example, as it turns out there was more than one use for a hydro-spanner in deep space, and one such use is to wedge the hatch door open because the electronic release is fried. He presses a button, and contrary to his hopes, _another_ warning light comes on. But there’s no klaxon this time, so he supposes that’s progress of a kind.

He’s just about to strip another panel (that should be cold but who the seven Correllian Hells even knows anymore) when a lumbering shape looms up beside the wedged open doorway.

“Hey,” Finn protests, pulling a driver form between his teeth, and turning to whoever is blocking his light, “I’m wor—oh.”

Chewie tilts his head to the side, rumbling gently in his giant chest as he peers into the alcove. At seven foot, even greying around the edges of his fur, the Wookie is an imposing figure, and Finn doesn’t quite know how to interact with him. Not really, not in the comfortable way Rey flings herself into his giant arms, or the way Poe and Rose joke and laugh with him.

Non humanoids hadn’t featured heavily in the presence of the First Order, at least, not as anything other than target practice. He suspects the Wookie knows this, just like how he seems to know Finn better than Finn would like to know himself. Which is what makes the Wookie’s relentless attention when he’s onboard all the more unnerving. It almost feels like he’s being watched, waiting for the moment he’ll slip up. He doesn’t appreciate it, even if he understands it. It makes their interactions… _tense,_ to say the least. To say any more would be impolite.

They stand still for a moment, before Finn remembers how to use words.

“I was just…” he motions vaguely at the exposed panel where an amber light is flicking on and off. “Trying.”

He doesn’t speak Shyriiwook, which is another mark against his First Order blemished history (it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter how often they tell him it doesn’t matter, he still doesn’t _feel_ right in these clothes, in this space, in this life) but Chewie understands Basic flawlessly and simply nods, whuffing as he leans into the already much too small space and inspects Finn’s work.

He makes another low sound deep in his chest, growling softly to himself as he hooks his claws through the exposed mess of wires, gently weaving through them with practiced ease. He pauses at one part, drawing back enough to give Finn room to breathe, and growls something incomprehensible.

“What?” Finn asks, feeling as frustrated with himself as he does the Wookie. He wishes momentarily that the golden droid were onboard but thinks better of it. That thing has more raw wiring in the processing system than anything else he’d ever seen, and that was saying a lot for someone currently standing in the middle of the Falcon’s innards.

Chewie whuffs again, repeating himself in a series of slow, soft barks pointing to the exposed board underneath, like speaking to a child. When Finn leans in, he sees immediately what the Wookie had found, a red hot blemish under the metal that spoke of too much heat and not enough cooling.

“Oh,” Finn said, leaning back too quickly and smacking his head on a pipe. “The coolant must be offline in the upper hull…”

Chewie growls and affirmative, pulling back entirely out of the space and motioning with a shaggy arm that Finn should follow.

“Me?” Finn asks, glancing up toward the ceiling, “why me?”

He might not have understood everything said next, but he caught the meaning of it entirely in the tone. _Kid, you started this…_

 

Several hours later, covered in sweat, grime and worse, Finn drops with a clatter onto the deck. A mess of wires and spare parts are strewn about his feet and something greasy has spilled all the way to the holoboard, but stars dammit, the coolant stream is functioning again—as was evident by the line of green lights lighting up the panels along the walls. It feels like a bigger victory than it really is.

“Whoo, that felt good,” he laughs, wiping his hands on a filthy rag and only managing to smear the grime around. He’d need a proper shower after this, with soap and water, but the sonic would have to do. “I can’t believe you guys had a pazaak deck up there,” he said, turning to Chewie who is sat at the holoboard, meticulously turning the battered old cards over between his razor sharp claws. “I didn’t think any of those existed anymore.”

Chewie murmurs something that likely implied that neither did he, pausing in the middle of turning over another card. There's a forlorn sadness to him in that moment, a whining keen deep in the back of his throat as he looks around the empty room, eyes lingering on Poe’s jacket over the back of a chair, Rey’s staff leaning against the wall...like somehow he's not sure if he belongs.

“Hey,” Finn says, nudging the Wookie on the shoulder and sliding into the seat opposite him, mess on the floor be damned. “Do you still know how to play?”

Chewie looks up at him for a moment, then barks sharply with laughter as he shuffles the ancient cards with practiced ease.

 _Do I still know how to play,_ it seems to say, _do I still know how to play? Kid, let me tell you some things…_

**Author's Note:**

> I have a lot of feelings about Chewie and Finn and how they'd get along, none of which I think the official canon will ever come close to touching on. But for everyone saying Poe is the new Han Solo, then I'd say you don't know Han Solo. 
> 
> And perhaps the new canon will eviscerate his past life, who knows. But Han Solo was an orphan—a thief, a runaway—bouncing from gang to gang until he was picked up by the very system that kept him down and wanted to turn him into a good little soldier pilot. Follow the rules, tow the line, and you too can be free...free to do what we tell you, free to do what we tell you... Until they tell him to skin a Wookie in chains. Because you see it's not uniforms and order Han has a problem with. It's the evil hidden behind them that chafes. So when he runs he runs good and hard, and Chewie follows because, well, he owes him a life debt. The least he can do is stick around until it's fulfilled.
> 
> Except he likes this kid, with his smart mouth and questionable life choices and grandiouse bullshit. He likes him and his two middle fingers up at society. Likes that even though he tries to hide it, Han Solo acts as much out of heart as greed. Struggles between the two. Knows it comes from the fear of hunger, as much as the joy of feasting.
> 
> And it works, for a while the life they have, petty smugglers and too much gambling. Until Han loses his heart to a rebel girl, a fighter, a former slave who pulls him into her war she has no intention of surviving. And when it ends in tragedy and Han runs again, Chewie follows. Because it's no longer about the life debt.
> 
> Years later, down on their luck and with fewer and fewer places to run to, he'll wonder what he could have done better to keep it from coming to this. But the thinks (hopes) when he spies "Ben" Kenobi in that shithole bar  
> at the arse end of the galaxy, that maybe this time they'll have a chance. 
> 
> Han never stood a chance against Leia. He'd been waiting his whole life to belong to someone like her, even if he never knew it. And Chewie worries because it's all so similar, it's all too similar...except that Leia wants to live and that is the defining difference between rage fueled by hatred, and righteous fury fueled by hope.  
> She'll drag the whole galaxy kicking and screaming with her if she has to. And somehow...somehow they make it out alive. Maybe not as whole as they went in, but whole enough to hope that maybe this time the peace will last.
> 
> But of course that's not the way things work, and it all begins again. 
> 
> And when he sees Finn, really sees him—the boy with the made up name and the borrowed jacket running as hard and fast as he can to anywhere but where he's been—well. I have feelings about Chewie and Finn, and I doubt the canon will ever come close to them. Thanks for coming to my TED talk in the end notes.


End file.
